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Useful Links

familysearch.org: Overwhelmingly the site I’ve used the most. Free with a minimal registration, run by the LDS, contains an almost unimaginable amount of information including how to order copies of microfilms to be shipped to your local family history center. You’ll have to pay shipping, but it’s negligible, something like $8 per film roll.

Immigration:

castlegarden.org: Site and search for the pre-Ellis immigrants. This will also return Ellis-era results as well, but will not show you the manifest images of pre-Ellis innigrants. For those, you want to go to the NARA site listed below.

JewishGen: Despite its name, this site has tons of other non-Jewish records as well. The best, most informative, most flexible Ellis/Castle searches you’ll find, more so than the searches on those two websites.

These are all freebies, which is why I haven’t bothered with Ancestry.com. It costs more than I want to pay out to gain access to European records that are accessible for free or shipping costs through familysearch.org. Ancestry.com is much more useful for people with little to no Great Migration ancestry. If like many Americans your ancestors passed through the immigration stations at New York and elsewhere during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ancestry.com is much less useful, and much more expensive.

If you’re looking for a particular person, I’d suggest methodically searching in all of the above sites. All of the databases have subtle differences that enable someone to show up in one and not in another.

Search on the following in all of them:

First Last name as you know it.

Potential misspellings and misreadings of old-style handwriting.

Wildcards.

Keep in mind age, town of origin, and destination. Strong pings include people listed on manifests containing other names commonly found in their town of origin.